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Thursday, March 19, 2015

`It Is All Plain and Aboveboard'

Some of us
expend much energy and ingenuity trying to avoid the “I.” Though skinny, the
runt among words in English, the first-person singular pronoun is pushy and
ever ready to leap on stage, the default writing mode of every egotist. “I” is
the word spoken most often on the telephone, and a pandemic of the irritating little
article infects the world, online and off. Since Montaigne, the form’s
progenitor, the essay has been a wrestling match with “I.” The strategies
spawned by its practitioners to avoid proliferating I’s have been many. Recently,
in connection with an online pest, Dave Lull observed that this blogger did not
possess an “interesting mind” (I would add that he cannot write). Perhaps it’s
a matter of sensibility, that elusive but instantly recognizable quality.

To assuage
the “I,” Montaigne specialized in simultaneously reveling in and deflating the
self. Lamb invented Elia, his affable stand-in. Mencken pulled it off with
sheer brashness and brio, as did Chesterton. In From Dawn to Decadence (2000), Jacques Barzun writes that Hazlitt
in Liber Amoris is “immediate, yet
detached.” That seems to be the trick. One is not confessing, pontificating or
whining but observing everything, even the viral little “I.” Hazlitt writes in
The Spirit of the Age (1825) of
William Cobbett, author of the wonderful Rural
Rides (1830) and an essayist who, like Mencken and Chesterton, was
essentially a journalist:

“His egotism is delightful, for there is no affectation in it. He does
not talk of himself for lack of something to write about, but because some
circumstance that has happened to himself is the best possible illustration of
the subject; and he is not the man to shrink from giving the best possible
illustration of the subject from a squeamish delicacy. He likes both himself
and his subject too well. He does not put himself before it, and say `admire me
first,’ but places us in the same situation with himself, and makes us see all
that he does. There is no blind-man's buff, no conscious hints, no awkward
ventriloquism, no testimonies of applause, no abstract, senseless
self-complacency, no smuggled admiration of his own person by proxy. It is all
plain and aboveboard.”